Coercion and tyranny are what governments do to us, whereas the private sector is where choice, consent, and spontaneity reign. This is one of the bedrock certainties of the modern Anglo-American Right, and each day brings fresh evidence that it’s …
How Keir Starmer betrayed the North East
For decades, the North East was home to the right sort of Left. Durham, Tyneside — these are places rich in labour history and heraldry, ancient seedbeds of a working-class trade unionism which predates the Labour Party itself. But, though …
Barbie is Fight Club for women
Exactly how old is Barbie, anyway? I speak not of Barbie the product — though her birth in 1959 is a fascinating story — but Barbie the person, the character, the entity who exists in undying hot pink perpetuity, in …
The revenge of Britain’s motorists
In 1934, the developer of a new private housing estate in East Oxford built two large brick walls across public roads to keep out the working-class residents of nearby local authority housing. Nine foot high and topped with iron spikes, …
Putin’s holy war on Ukraine
As the world watched the Wagner mercenaries make good on their mutinous threats and advance on Moscow last month, Vladimir Putin shot them down in a television address. Spitting with rage and refusing to utter Prigozhin’s name, he said that …
The Conservative case for revolution
Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon begins with the fall of Troy. Clytemnestra, wife of the Greek king, hears news of victory, and imagines the “clash of cries” in the captured city, as the victors and the vanquished mingle. Musing on the destruction, …
Will Uxbridge ever trust again?
Uxbridge is Metroland, the paradise at the end of the Metropolitan Line. It is a century-old marketing invention selling the fantasy that, if you got on the Metropolitan Line at Aldgate, and stayed on for an hour, you would alight …
The clue China is preparing for war
In a sinister reversion to the very worst days of Mao’s rule, Communist Party officials across China are blindly obeying orders to rapidly increase the supply of arable land by any means possible. As with the “Great Leap Forward” that …
Why fascism won’t take over Spain
Spaniards heading to the polls this Sunday will not do so cheerfully. Not only is the election disrupting the summer holidays of more than a quarter of Spanish voters — but the options on the ballot paper are, at first …
A heatwave isn’t the end of the world
As I write this, in my favourite local café in Rome, the temperature outside is close to 40°C. So yes, it’s hot. Yet, thanks to a relatively old invention — air conditioning — I’m able to work in comfort. The …
Westminster has failed Selby
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon in North Yorkshire, and Rishi Sunak is trying to reassure the North Yorkshire Conservative Association gathered on his front lawn that all is not lost. Sheltered under a marquee, he’s like a cruise-ship crooner entertaining …
The high priestess of celebrity therapists
Would you want to eavesdrop on an anonymous couple’s therapy session? Hear a woman talk to her husband about the revelation that he secretly fathered twins with a lesbian couple she had doubts about, just after he’d cheated on her …
Could you beat Elon Musk in a fight?
It never ends well when the geek humiliates the jock in high-school films. One minute the bespectacled boy is running rings round the football star in algebra class; the next, they’re in the playground, and the smart kid is getting …
The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants
It is a drab Wednesday in April and I am sat naked in a transparent plastic shed. Tucked away in a forest near the sleepy town of Uckfield, a woman starts to hit me in the face with some birch …
How disastrous births haunt women
The third time I went into labour, I was determined to avoid getting told off. With both of my previous births, I had somehow managed to get things wrong. My errors the first time: going to hospital too early, then, …
